Take a trip back to 1997 with a never-opened Nintendo 64 disc drive development kit

YouTuber Shane Luis tweeted some incredible photos of a new game development kit for the Nintendo 64 (64DD) disk drive, a very rare peripheral never released outside of Japan that played on proprietary floppy disks. You can (and should!) Read the whole topic starting with this tweet, but I will share some of the photos here in this article.

This is what the box looks like – nothing flashy.

Inside the dark blue box in the upper right corner were five 64DD development discs, which were dark blue instead of the gray used for retail games.

The development kit also included a special adapter to allow developers to connect two N64 cartridges at once instead of just one. When everything was connected, it looked like:

Here is the 64DD itself, which has a blue outline around the disk slot used to signify a development device that matches the color used for development disks:

And here is the entire 64DD development system connected to each other and connected to a Nintendo 64. It’s huge! (Although apparently not as big as the PS5.)

I’m not sure if I will ever be able to see a 64DD, as the peripheral was not a huge success (only nine games were released for it), and it was only released in Japan. But these photos may be the next best thing and they are just a simple interesting look at something from Nintendo’s past.

Once again, I strongly recommend going through the entire discussion in full or check your photo album on the Internet Archive.